“You see,” she murmured, “we are old acquaintances.”

Richard, with his eyes still intently fixed on her, returned, “You are very beautiful!”

The words slipped out.  Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.  Her overpowering beauty struck his heart, and, like an instrument that is touched and answers to the touch, he spoke.

Miss Desborough made an effort to trifle with this terrible directness; but his eyes would not be gainsaid, and checked her lips.  She turned away from them, her bosom a little rebellious.  Praise so passionately spoken, and by one who has been a damsel’s first dream, dreamed of nightly many long nights, and clothed in the virgin silver of her thoughts in bud, praise from him is coin the heart cannot reject, if it would.  She quickened her steps.

“I have offended you!” said a mortally wounded voice across her shoulder.

That he should think so were too dreadful.

“Oh no, no! you would never offend me.”  She gave him her whole sweet face.

“Then why—­why do you leave me?”

“Because,” she hesitated, “I must go.”

“No.  You must not go.  Why must you go?  Do not go.”

“Indeed I must,” she said, pulling at the obnoxious broad brim of her hat; and, interpreting a pause he made for his assent to her rational resolve, shyly looking at him, she held her hand out, and said, “Good-bye,” as if it were a natural thing to say.

The hand was pure white—­white and fragrant as the frosted blossom of a Maynight.  It was the hand whose shadow, cast before, he had last night bent his head reverentially above, and kissed—­resigning himself thereupon over to execution for payment of the penalty of such daring—­by such bliss well rewarded.

He took the hand, and held it, gazing between her eyes.

“Good-bye,” she said again, as frankly as she could, and at the same time slightly compressing her fingers on his in token of adieu.  It was a signal for his to close firmly upon hers.

“You will not go?”

“Pray, let me,” she pleaded, her sweet brows suing in wrinkles.

“You will not go?” Mechanically he drew the white hand nearer his thumping heart.

“I must,” she faltered piteously.

“You will not go?”

“Oh yes! yes!”

“Tell me.  Do you wish to go?”

The question was a subtle one.  A moment or two she did not answer, and then forswore herself, and said, Yes.

“Do you—­you wish to go?” He looked with quivering eyelids under hers.

A fainter Yes responded.

“You wish—­wish to leave me?” His breath went with the words.

“Indeed I must.”

Her hand became a closer prisoner.

All at once an alarming delicious shudder went through her frame.  From him to her it coursed, and back from her to him.  Forward and back love’s electric messenger rushed from heart to heart, knocking at each, till it surged tumultuously against the bars of its prison, crying out for its mate.  They stood trembling in unison, a lovely couple under these fair heavens of the morning.